The British Government in South Africa has always played the unpopular part of the friend and protector of the native servants.  It was upon this very point that the first friction appeared between the old settlers and the new administration.  A rising with bloodshed followed the arrest of a Dutch farmer who had maltreated his slave.  It was suppressed, and five of the participants were hanged.  This punishment was unduly severe and exceedingly injudicious.  A brave race can forget the victims of the field of battle, but never those of the scaffold.  The making of political martyrs is the last insanity of statesmanship.  It is true that both the man who arrested and the judge who condemned the prisoners were Dutch, and that the British Governor interfered on the side of mercy; but all this was forgotten afterwards in the desire to make racial capital out of the incident.  It is typical of the enduring resentment which was left behind that when, after the Jameson raid, it seemed that the leaders of that ill-fated venture might be hanged, the beam was actually brought from a farmhouse at Cookhouse Drift to Pretoria, that the Englishmen might die as the Dutchmen had died in 1816.  Slagter’s Nek marked the dividing of the ways between the British Government and the Afrikaners.

And the separation soon became more marked.  There were injudicious tamperings with the local government and the local ways, with a substitution of English for Dutch in the law courts.  With vicarious generosity, the English Government gave very lenient terms to the Kaffir tribes who in 1834 had raided the border farmers.  And then, finally, in this same year there came the emancipation of the slaves throughout the British Empire, which fanned all smouldering discontents into an active flame.

It must be confessed that on this occasion the British philanthropist was willing to pay for what he thought was right.  It was a noble national action, and one the morality of which was in advance of its time, that the British Parliament should vote the enormous sum of twenty million pounds to pay compensation to the slaveholders, and so to remove an evil with which the mother country had no immediate connection.  It was as well that the thing should have been done when it was, for had we waited till the colonies affected had governments of their own it could never have been done by constitutional methods.  With many a grumble the good British householder drew his purse from his fob, and he paid for what he thought to be right.  If any special grace attends the virtuous action which brings nothing but tribulation in this world, then we may hope for it over this emancipation.  We spent our money, we ruined our West Indian colonies, and we started a disaffection in South Africa, the end of which we have not seen.  Yet if it were to be done again we should doubtless do it.  The highest morality may prove also to be the highest wisdom when the half-told story comes to be finished.